Keeping Pace
She says the city’s finally got to me
And winks like she knows that I know exactly what she means
And I wonder if she’s right
Silently, because if it’s true, I’m not sure it’s something I like
I’ve recently longed to be a simple man
To seek my future without a complex plan
But she just sits and stares at me
Eyes locked on a face that she doesn’t really see
Visions of Chelsea, hotel sheets in the morning,
And the people we never came to be
She rolls her eyes,
sighs,
lifts her hands to my eyes, and replies,
Darling, one of us was bound to fall behind.
Some days I feel desolate
Empty like the city on a Sunday
And suddenly insignificant
Like a pixel of paint on a map scaled to size
It seems impossible that we’d all fit
With such enormous lives
But here we are, spinning on this little blue dot,
Fighting over pieces of paper and regions of rocks
Failing to recognize the tiny enormity of what we’ve already got
It’s what she does to me,
Like the way her hair smells like a memory
The scent comes cursed with visions of her arms clutching me
Like the whole world was a storm, and I was the strongest tree
She says the city’s changing me
That the hustle and bustle finally got to me
I’m not the man she met, she says, but that’s not the surprise,
It’s something different drifting just behind my eyes
Like I spent these last years fighting for my life
And barely made it out the other side.
And I want to disagree, but I’ve seen it too
Creeping up into almost everything I do
This overwhelming urge to redefine free
By recognizing my right to decide what it really means
I don’t have to chase dollars, I don’t even have to chase dreams
I could even choose to sit back and just watch this silly little scene
The only thing that seems to matter, the only thing I’ve found I need
Are these hearts we casually shatter, and the others I’ve gathered around me
I admit the city got to me,
The cold flow of faces turned races into trickery
And now I refuse to run.
Though I feel no sense of resignation in what I’ve done
It’s why her hand finds mine
Across some great imaginary divide
Because progress in this race is also difficult to define,
But Love means that no one ever falls behind,
So call me Mr. Slow and Steady, call me Mr. Just-in-case
Just as long she remembers that someone’s always ready
Lest she ever lose her pace
